Original OD Title Page

Not enough characters. . .

I really need more space for my titles, you know? All my bad habits can't fit into 25 characters or less. Just FYI, the subtitle for this diary is the 'Complete Idiots' Guide to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Way of Life' TM. I think I should start off with some of my goals and objectives for this diary. Technically, I'm a bulletin board junkie. But bulletin boards tend to be fairly specialized, and oftentimes the toxic sludge that needs to be released from my brain into cyberspace doesn't really belong on Something Fishy or Kicksports or even Lonely Planet. So I guess this is kinds of like having a BBS for all the contradicting parts of my brain. I hope I can refrain from flaming myself too badly. Another one of my big hopes is that my diary doesn't somehow turn out to be flaming neon pukeberry type on a black background. See, I don't know HTML and I haven't the faintest idea how this is going to look. I've browsed through OD before, and I have a hard time believing that the color schemes I've encountered were not foisted off on innocent OD users by an evil random OD template god. I hope that my text comes out in paragraphs. I work in academia, but am somewhat of rebel in that I like people to have half a chance to comprehend what I'm writing. By the time I start working on my dissertation, we hope to have that beaten out of me. But for now. . . It looks like I'm running out of space, if that's what I'm to take this looming scroll bar to mean. So I'll have to start in with the bad habits on a later entry.

This was, as you can see from the title, the first page of my inaugural voyage into digital narcissism. Why I continue to copy it into the first pages of each new journal-as I'm generally endeavoring to escape something-is largely beyond me. It gets harder to describe myself as I get older. Is this an inherent malfunction? Or is it-as I realized editing links1 into the above chunk of ancient history-that I've simply ceased to be all that interesting? I am no longer the polyglot/exotic foreigner. I haven't been able to run since 2004. In the past few years, I've evolved mainly in the form of file folders filled to varying degrees of capacity and secreted in the dungeons of medical/social service records around the Midwest. 1. The websites mentioned are the only thing I have edited. While everything else may have gone done the toilet, damned if I haven't picked up a scant few rudimentary HTML tags over the past few years. I felt it was important that my links actually go somewhere.